An integrated reporting and analysis tools is delivering exceptional ROI at South African Breweries (SAB), one of South Africa’s leading producer-distributors of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages and one of the nation’s largest manufacturing organisations.
The group runs an ERP system across its operations to manage its sales, finance, marketing and supply chain functions, producing high data volumes across systems in a complex IT structure.
The problem
In this milieu, SAB struggled to measure and manage output and perform data analysis. Business users employed various reporting tools to extract and analyse data, but these solutions proved complex and ineffective.
The organisation set out to find a solution that would allow it to combine and analyse multiple data sets across different systems. The solution had to be easy to use, fast and insightful in SAB’s ongoing quest to measure and improve operational efficiency. It also had to handle vast amounts of data (230 000) rows of data are added every day in the operational system alone).
The solution
BusinessIntelligent introduced QlikView to SAB’s Operations Department who requested a proof of concept. The results outperformed the corporate IT alternative in terms of fit for purpose, BusinessIntelligent’s Tony Bell told SmartProcurement.
Test users indicated their satisfaction with Qlikview on all aspects and 500 licences were purchased together with a connector to the ERP system.
User reaction
Users were impressed with the extraordinary speed of implementation recording that the application enabled them to start daily data analysis immediately, facilitated fast and accurate decisions and enabled them to gain insights and optimise results.
“We suddenly had reporting and analysis at the click of a button,” SAB business analyst Sonja Deysel reported. “I now use QlikView for all my reporting and analysis. It associates all the information and lets us get into all the key issues very quickly. Previous data queries took three hours for data extraction, more time to build a report, and more to do analysis. Today it takes 10 minutes to find the issue and resolve it.”
Payback
Within a year of implementing QlikView, SAB reported an exceptionally high return on investment. This was the result of users’ improved ability to control and manage information and provide their own reporting and analysis.
Operations Excellence Manager Sean Milne, “Our intention when purchasing QlikView was to provide superior customer service and productivity in the business. We have achieved that as well as an exceptional ROI through superior execution. QlikView allowed us to enhance our performance management culture with the power of our information.
Spend analysis: providing data visibility
The visibility that spend analysis enables provides the necessary foundation for procurement organizations to make better, more informed sourcing decisions.
“Reporting has to be agile and in real-time,” says Bell.
The development of key performance indicators with line-of-sight into purchasing activity (detailed drill-down capabilities for supplier analysis, item analysis and analysis of buyers) is a critical and a fundamental capability a procurement division must have.
With line-of-sight of your data in near real time you become immediately aware of your data quality and you are able to avoid data that is incorrectly classified or duplicated.
Savings are typically achieved by identifying opportunities to aggregate spend and negotiate superior contracts; identifying and reducing non-compliant or “maverick” spend; and improving procurement operations and supplier performance.
However, despite these clear benefits, more than 50% of organisations utilize manual tools and services today to collect and analyse spend data, limiting visibility into spend and leaving money on the table, says Tony Bell.
By deploying solutions to automate data collection, classification, analysis and reporting, enterprises will:
1. realize improved cost savings through improved strategic sourcing capabilities;
2. reduce financial savings leakage by driving compliance to negotiated contracts; and
3. increase visibility into enterprise-wide spend and dramatically improve reporting capabilities.
BusinessIntelligent’s recent work with government and academic institutions has improved insights into their spend analysis and decision making leading to significant operational effectiveness.
For more information on improving data analytics, contact Tony Bell on t.bell@businessintelligent.co.za
The importance of spend analysis in the contemporary procurement department will be the focus of an upcoming SmartProcurement half-day Spend Analysis workshop in Centurion on Wednesday 30 May 2012.
For more information or to REGISTER e-mail Erieka Santos on events@smartprocurement.co.za or call 086 133 4326
